This blog is produced by the Consortium for Project Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for anyone interested in the practical application of leadership to project management. We aim to publish meaningful articles by various authors on a monthly basis focused on stories about lessons learned in leading and managing projects.

Monday, October 13, 2014

The Flies and the Bees: Tailoring Project Processes to Project Context

Peter Drucker argued that since the study of management
began in the 1930s, several assumptions regarding the realities of management must be unlearned. One of these assumptions
is that: “there is (or there must be) ONE right way to manage people.” Drucker further
noted: “In no other area are the basic traditional assumptions held as
firmly—though mostly subconsciously—as in respect to people and their
management.” More importantly, “In no other area are they so totally at odds
with reality and so totally counterproductive.”[i]

The following experiment demonstrates one
possible “counterproductive” consequence of clinging to the “one best way” when
at odds with reality:

If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees and
the same number of flies, and lay the bottle horizontally, with its base (the
closed end) to the window, you will find that the bees will persist, till they
die of exhaustion or hunger, in their endeavor to discover an opening through
the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied
forth through the neck on the opposite side.…
It is the bees’ love of light, it is their very intelligence, that is
their undoing in this experiment. They evidently imagine that the issue from
every prison must be where the light shines clearest; and they act in
accordance, and persist in too-logical action. To bees, glass is a supernatural
mystery.… And, the greater their intelligence, the more inadmissible, more
incomprehensible, will the strange obstacle appear. Whereas the featherbrained
flies, careless of logic… flutter wildly hither and thither, and meeting here
the good fortune that often waits on the simple… necessarily end up by
discovering the friendly opening that restores their liberty to them.[ii]

Indeed, the
“featherbrained” team that employs a random search (like the flies) may perform
better in a dynamic environment than the “too-systematic team,” which completely lacks sensitivity to
variations in project context (like the bees). The challenge is to transform
the “too-systematic team” and render it context-sensitive, that is, a team
which applies expediently proven
principles, practices, and processes as general instructions that must be tailored
to each unique context of the project (e.g., project size, stability of
objectives, speed, task complexity, organizational culture, extent of top
management support, and team members’ experience and skills).

Following is a brief example of how the different contexts
of two information technology projects affect the working culture and work
processes. The first project involves the development of control software for
an airplane. The proper behavior in this case is highly technical. FAA
regulations must be followed. Anything you do — or don’t do — would be evidence
in a lawsuit 20 years from now. The development staff shares an engineering
culture that values caution, precision, repeatability, and double-checking
everyone’s work. In contrast, the development of a word processor that is to be
used over the web requires a different approach. “Correct behavior” is whatever
woos a vast and inarticulate audience of Microsoft Word users over to your
software. There are no regulatory requirements that matter (other than those
governing public stock offerings). Time to market matters — 20 months from now,
it will all be over, for good or ill.[iii]

Unfortunately, the prevailing project management paradigm
still advocates context-free processes and practices, rather than tailoring
them to the unique context of the project.
Thus, the emphasis in most projects is still placed on the “standard” or
the “common” rather than on the “unique.” Melgrati and Damiani eloquently make
this point: “Project management ideology is paradoxical because it focuses on
repetitive aspects and ‘marginalizes’ the uniqueness and originality that
should instead characterize the project.”[iv]

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What is "Living Order"?

Embracing the "living order" concept is the first practice of project leadership. Leaders must be comfortable leading in today's environment of constant change. Bergson (1907) identified two types of order: the traditional concept of perfect geometric order, and living order -- which can be messy, even chaotic, with project problems and surprises in an evolving organization.